“Oh. Oh shit,” I say.
“My parents never hid from me that I was adopted,” she says quietly. “But they said they got me from an agency. I can remember now that it didn’t really go down that way. Valkyrja hand-picked my parents, and tried to warn them this might happen, but they didn’t listen. They said I was normal. That lots of kids were adopted and it doesn’t matter.” Karen’s face twists with sudden fury and she leaps to her feet, throws the half-full glass straight out the patio door, over the balcony, into the night sky. The way it was flying, it looks like it won’t hit the ground for miles. “Well you were wrong about that, weren’t you!” she shouts after it.
I rise and put my hand on her shoulder. “Hey, hey. It’s all right, okay? I’ll help you,” I say. “Getting powers is…it’s weird. I’ll walk you through it.”
“You don’t understand!” says Karen, shrugging away from me. “I’ve got her memories. And her mother’s memories, and her mother’s memories. All of them. All the way back to the beginning. More of them every day.”
“And that’s…that’s bad?”
“Yes, it’s fucking bad!” shouts Karen. “Memory isn’t what we remember, it’s who we are. The way we think, what we want, our opinions. Everything. I’m sixteen. She was twelve hundred. I don’t—I can’t compete with that!” She begins to pace, hugging herself tight. “Her memories are changing me, making me think thoughts that aren’t mine. It’s getting harder and harder to remember what’s me and what’s her. Keeping track of myself is like squirting an eyedropper full of dye into a swimming pool. I see a dog and I remember a German Shepard I once had, but it’s not me, it’s my fucking great-grandmother who had a dog.”
Karen sinks back down onto the couch. Her wings fold protectively around her shoulders. “Valkyrja wants to come back from the dead, and she’ll kill me to do it.”
“She…” I have to fight not to stammer. “Valkyrja wouldn’t…” Karen sets her jaw, eyes daring me to finish that sentence. “Okay. Okay, that sucks. What can I do to help?”
Karen’s wings relax. “You’re stronger than the other Dreadnoughts. You can do things they couldn’t. You told me—” she flinches “—told her, I mean, that you could see…what did you call it, the lattice? And tug on it?”
“Yeah, the lattice. It’s sort of the backside of reality.”
Karen nods. “I want you to see if you can reach into my head and pull this…thing out.”
I sit down across from her. “Karen, I can try, but—”
She nods sharply. “Good. Try.”
“I’ve never done anything like this and—”
“I’ve got nothing to lose,” says Karen.
“Yes, you do, is what I’m trying to say. I’ve healed my body with the lattice, but only at the cost of creating other injuries. If I pull something out of your head, it might give you brain damage.”
Karen’s wings flare, her fists clench. “This is brain damage! She’s eating me!”
“Calm down,” I say, trying to sound placating. “I’ll help you. I just…we’re going to do this slow, okay? We might not get it all on the first try. I’m not going to be responsible for turning you into a vegetable.”
She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Please. Please, can we do it now? I’m not sure how much longer I can keep hold of myself.”
“Yeah, come here.” I scoot forward on my seat, pull the chair a little closer to her. She leans forward on the couch. I roll my shoulders, take deep breaths. There are tricks I’ve learned to make the lattice “cleaner,” more precise in my head. I rub my hands together and blow out a long breath. When I shut my eyes and hold my hands out to either side of her head, the hard white net of light and heat leaps into focus. Everything in the Universe—everything—shows up in the lattice, represented in my mind’s eye as an infinitely complex grid of glowing white strings, endlessly dense with more detail unfolding the closer I look. Her blood squirts through the arteries and back down through the veins. She swallows, and I watch every muscle and fold of tissue flex and release. Her eyes are shut, and her retinas quiet down, cones and rods no longer firing information at the optic nerves.
And behind and above her eyes, her brain.
There are two things I never get tired of looking at. The stars from low orbit and human brains. Once you’re above the atmosphere, the stars are a brilliant spray of millions and millions of points of light. It’s hard to believe how many of them there are until you get up there and see them. You can sort of get a feel for this if you head into the deep woods on a cold, still night, but that’s nothing compared to the view you get from orbit.
Brains, viewed through the lattice, give me that same kick of awe. The squishy stuff inside your skull is a densely complicated biological computer. Millions of cells, billions of connections. Nerve endings fire in waves, each thought traced in swirling wet fractals. Every one of us has a miracle wrapped up inside our heads. Sometimes I don’t even sleep at night, I just lie down, close my eyes, and look at my own brain for hours until it’s time to get back up.
Karen’s brain is beautiful. A compact, folded-up galaxy swirling with energy and light, a bundle of heat and potential. But there’s something else here too. It’s almost like there’s a second pattern, laid over and alongside the first. It definitely feels like a different entity. Denser. Colder. As I watch, two of the strings from the second pattern get tangled with a string from the first. There’s a flash of light and heat, and then I can’t tell where one pattern is and another begins.
“I can see it,” I say. “It’s uh, it’s tangled up in there.”
“Get it out, get it out!”
“Hold on, this might be painful…”
I’ve been practicing with the lattice for months. The first time I directly grabbed the strings of reality and pulled them in a new direction, I hurt myself badly. Since then, I’ve started small, worked on delicacy and control. Now I can be very subtle when I have time to put effort into it. But this…this is something way beyond anything I’ve ever tried. Slowly, I extend my senses until I can feel one of the strings of her pattern. It seems to slide through my fingers, vibrate in my chest. When I have a good grip, I reach for a string from the other pattern, the interloper. Gently, I begin to pull them apart, let them relax, pull again, let them relax. One by one, the patterns begin to pull away from each other, threads parting with bursts of light.
Karen hisses, clenches.
“Are you okay?”
“Keep going,” she says.
“I want you to tell me if it gets too painful.”
She grunts out a yes, which turns into a whimper.
Little by little I separate the two patterns until I come to a big tangle of these strings, wrapped in and around Karen’s mind. I search and I search, but there’s no easy way to undo these knots.
“Can you tell if it is working?” I ask.
“I…I don’t know. I think so. There are…I can’t…yes. Keep going.”
“All right. I think this next part is really going to suck; are you sure you want me to—”
“Yes!” she practically screams. “Just do it!”
With another deep breath to steady myself, I try to work the bundle loose, separate it out into its individual strands. The patterns start to peel away from each other with pops of heat. Karen hisses and clenches and then begins to scream.
I slam out of her head as fast as I can. “Okay, that’s enough, no more tonight.”
“No, wait…” Karen reaches out for me and almost falls on her face before I catch her. “We have…we have to keep going.” Her left wing spasms.
“And we will, but not right now. You need to rest.”
“Please,” she mutters into my chest.
“I think I got some of it,” I say as I set her back on the couch. “Why don’t you see if you’re missing any of Valkyrja’s memories?”
Karen closes her bloodshot eyes and wraps her wings around herself. After a moment, a quiet smile softens her f
ace. “Yes, I can’t remember what Sveldholt’s main hall looked like anymore. I know that I did have that memory, but it’s gone now.” She opens her eyes, and it’s like she’s a different person, happy and free. “Thank you. I feel…more like myself.”
A memory comes back to me. Valkyrja approaching me on the roof of Legion Tower. She knew my father was—and this has taken me months to be able to say, even to myself—she knew he was abusing me. She offered to help me, but I was too scared to take her up on it. And now here’s her ghost trying to murder her own daughter. Her daughter who she abandoned. We didn’t know each other very long. Looks like I didn’t really know her at all. I stand up, suddenly uncomfortable.
“Do you want some aspirin?” I ask, trying to keep the disquiet off my face.
Karen chuckles. “Yeah, that’d be pretty cool. Thanks.”
When I return from the bathroom with the medicine, Karen is swigging rum straight from the bottle.
“Hey, uh, look I just flew up from Antarctica and got my ass kicked by a blackcape tonight,” I say. “I sorta want to conk out. Do you want me to show you the guest room?”
“Sure, sure,” says Karen.
She screws the cap back onto the rum. A good third of the bottle has disappeared. Doc is going to kill me. I take Karen into the hallway outside Doc’s main condo, show her to the one we’ve got set up as guest rooms.
“The interior doors are all unlocked, except for that one over there. Doctor Impossible’s sealed it with some pretty nasty hypertech. Don’t try to go in there. Seriously. The elevator is keyed to our thumbprints, and the fire doors all lock behind you, so if you leave you’ll need to fly up to get back in.”
Karen nods. “Right. Hey, Danielle, thank you. I mean it.” She wraps me in a sloppy hug. “I thought I was going to die.”
“I’m not going to let her hurt you, Karen. I promise.”
The next morning, I’m yanked out of a nightmare by the pounding at my door. For a brief, horrible moment I forget I don’t live with my parents anymore, and I think my father has come to scream at me. But no, that part of my life is done. He can’t get to me anymore. My hair is soaked through with night sweat again.
I float out of bed and open my door to find Karen standing there, barely holding back the panic.
“They’re back,” she says with a trembling voice. “All of the memories we killed, they’re back, and I think they’re even stronger now.”
Chapter Nine
“I’m going to die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“I’m so fucking dead.”
“No, you’re not. Pass the syrup.”
Karen hands me the warm plastic jug of syrup. “This is taking too long. You said you had a plan.”
“Mhmm, I do,” I mumble around a big bite of waffle. We’re sitting at the breakfast table, demolishing a stack of waffles. Doc’s pug Guts is camped under my seat, waiting to dart in and claim any fallen morsels. “We’re gonna go see a friend of mine who does magic. If he can’t help us, I think he’ll know where to look. But it might take some time, so I need you to be as much yourself as we can get you to be, and I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time focusing when I’m starving.”
“I guess,” Karen says quietly. Then she takes an enormous bite.
“Tell me about you. What were you like before, you know, this?”
“Uh,” she says. Chews for a moment, swallows. “I play saxophone. I’m leader of the school’s jazz band. Or was, anyhow.”
“Cool. What else?”
“Um. I’m a big math nerd.”
“Really? I hate math.”
“It’s not so bad,” she says between bites. The edge of panic that’s been behind her voice all morning starts to fade. “The way they teach it is stupid and pointless.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So the maid-bot should have done laundry overnight. Are your clothes clean?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Karen pulls the last waffle onto her plate. Her clothes may be clean, but they’re still worn after what I’m guessing must have been a few months on the street. Her polo shirt is one of those corporate shirts you can find in a thrift store, with a big crown over her breast pocket—even after being washed, there’s a dark stain on one of the cuffs, and the collar is frayed at one end.
“Sure thing. Are you going to want more, or is that going to be enough?” I ask.
“This will be fine, thank you,” she says quietly.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her.
Her smile is drawn. “All right, sure. Thank you. I feel a little better now. More like myself.”
We finish breakfast and push the plates aside. The maid-bots will take care of everything. (Living with a mad scientist: it doesn’t suck.)
“I called Charlie, and he said he’ll be waiting for us. Do you want to try and do this incognito, or should I bring my suit?”
She shrugs. “Whichever way is faster.”
“Okay, wait here a moment, I’ve got to get dressed.”
A couple minutes later, I’m in full Dreadnought regalia, my white and blue bodyglove snug all the way up to the top of my neck. Karen is waiting for me on the balcony, her back turned, looking out at the city. Her wings are folded, but for the first time this morning they don’t look like they’re clamped down with tension.
The clouds blew away overnight, and it’s one of those hard winter skies that lets you see for miles. The downtown towers glitter in the sun. A blimp is circling the stadium.
“Charlie likes to hang out at a used bookstore at the edge of town,” I say. “We can get there in a few minutes, if you’re okay with flying.”
“Yes, I can fly,” she says. She turns to me. “You’ve grown into your role, Danielle. I’m glad.”
The bottom falls out of my stomach; I can see Valkyrja behind her face. The twinkle in the eyes. The quiet, understanding smile. “Uh—”
Karen goes pale, claps her hands to her mouth. After a moment, she hisses, “Do you see what it’s like? She’s eating me!”
“Let’s go. Right now.”
I step onto a stool, then push off of the handrail and shoot up into the sky. A moment later, Karen spreads her wings, pumps once, twice, and then they snap taut, surrounded in a pale nimbus of power.
“This way!” I shout over the wind, banking hard toward the edge of town. Karen catches up to me, and a moment later pulls ahead. In a matter of seconds we’re at the threshold of the sound barrier. The city whips by beneath us, just a few hundred feet distant. As we near the bookstore, I reach out to tap her shoulder, and point. We spiral out of the air and skid to a stop on the roof.
Karen pulls her wings in tight and hugs herself. “So he should be here, right?”
“Yeah.” The roof access door doesn’t budge when I try it. “Shit, they locked it again. Hold on, I have to find the key. They said they’d leave one around here somewhere…”
“It’s on top of the door frame, near the left,” she says. She’s right. I look at her, confused. “I can sense where things that open the way are,” she explains, voice tight, face blank. “It’s…one of those things she did.”
“Oh.”
“Also people who are about to die, and any serious violence within a hundred miles. Plus ravens, swans, horses, and alcohol. Technically, it’s not a hundred miles, it’s twenty-seven leagues.”
I point at the door. “Let’s go get Charlie.”
“Yes. Let’s.”
The stairwell is dark inside. It was only used by the occasional maintenance guy coming up to take a look at the air conditioner until I started dropping in a lot. The owners don’t mind me traipsing through the store in my uniform, since it’s a bit of that distinctive New Port local flavor that’s so important for an independent bookstore trying to stay afloat. We step out of the stairwell and pass through a small office area blocked off by bookshelves, and then on to the main sales floor itself. The shelves here reach all the way to the ceiling, with wheel
ed ladders in each aisle to access the top shelves. A shelf-stocker looks up as we pass through her aisle.
“Hi, Dreadnought.”
“Hi, Lucy. Is Charlie here?”
She nods. “Yeah, he’s in the rare books room.” And then, with dexterity and a command of throwing objects that is too smooth to be natural, she tosses four books in a row up onto the top shelf. They land neatly one after the other, spines out, perfectly placed. Lucy turns, grabs another armful, and flicks them up one by one with a careless snapping of her wrist.
That’s the other reason they don’t mind me coming through here: Raven’s Used Books is staffed almost entirely by metahumans. They don’t advertise it, but they understand what it’s like to have powers and be gawked at because of it. Here, at least, I’m almost normal, and sometimes I need that more than I’d like to admit. Most people with superpowers don’t want to be superheroes or supervillains. Most of them just want normal lives, and while it’s hard to understand why anyone would trade what I do for stocking shelves, I am grateful that there’s a place where it’s not a big deal that I enter through the rooftop door. Karen is not so blasé. Being superhuman is still new to her, I remind myself, and she tightens up, begins to stare.
The rare books room is a walled-off section of the top floor with chest-high dividers of glossy old wood looking in on a spread of polished oak tables and an eclectic collection of chairs. Charlie is in his usual spot near a window, hunched down behind a tower of ratty old leather books. He’s Calamity’s ex-boyfriend, a skinny black kid who tried out the superhero gig for a few months and decided he wasn’t overly fond of running around on rain-slick rooftops hoping not to get shot by drug dealers. He’s much happier skulking about what he ominously refers to as his sanctum, occasionally emerging into the light of day to do research or test his new projects. He looks up as we enter.
“Hey, Dreadnought.” Charlie and I met before I became Dreadnought, but he’s hung out with enough capes that he knows to use my supranym in front of someone he doesn’t know. Yes, even if my identity is not a secret. It’s a subculture thing. “I was just getting settled. What’s up?”
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